Introspection & remembering

Abstract

We argue that episodic remembering, understood as the ability to re-experience past events, requires a particular kind of introspective ability and understanding. It requires the understanding that first person experiences can represent actual events. In this respect it differs from the understanding required by the traditional false belief test for children, where a third person attribution (to others or self) of a behavior governing representation is sufficient. The understanding of first person experiences as representations is also required for problem solving with images. In support of this argument we review developmental evidence that children's episodic remembering is independent of and emerges after mastery of the false belief task but emerges together with the use of imagery for solving visual rotation tasks.Keywords Memory development · Episodic memory · Remembering · Theory of Mind · Imagery · Introspection Episodic rememberingResearch on memory in psychology commonly splits our longterm memory into the hierarchical classification shown in Fig. 1. In this classification levels of consciousness play an important role. Of specific interest to us is the subdivision within the explicit/conscious memories. This subdivision within explicit memory was introduced by Tulving (1972) which he later linked explicitly to further levels of consciousness. So-called "semantic memory" requires noetic consciousness while "episodic memory" requires autonoetic consciousness (implicit memories are anoetic). In this paper Tulving also suggested how to assess the difference empirically, i.e., by asking people whether they "remember" or simply "know" that an item had occurred in the learned list.Distinguishing between remembering an event and knowing that the event has happened is not only useful as an empirical means but is also the more adequate terminology for what

Infants' teleological and belief inference: A recurrent connectionist approach to their minimal representational and computational requirements

“…Neither is it necessary that infants form a mental image of where the object is from the protagonist's point of view (Perner, Kloo, & Stöttinger, 2007). Rather, it is only necessary to keep track of another individual's knowledge of events and distinguish it from one's own knowledge.…”

“…If [this] association … is still sustained in the frontal cortex when babies are exposed to the test stimuli, a consistent test combination will need less processing and, consequently, a shorter looking time than a new combination of elements" (Perner and Ruffman, 2005, p. 215). These authors added a second account, discussed earlier, that, "infants may have noticed (or are innately predisposed to assume) that people look for an object where they last saw it and not necessarily where the object actually is" (Perner and Ruffman, 2005, p. 215; see also Perner, Kloo & Stöttinger, 2007).…”

Children’s Binding of What-Where-When-Whoin Episodic Memory: Identifying Oneself in the Past

“…When direct (versus indirect) exposure to test materials is the measure of episodic memory similar results are found (Perner, Kloo & Gornik, 2007). However, turning to ability (3) --metarepresentation --no evidence has emerged to date of a relation between first-order theory of mind as assessed by tasks such as unexpected transfer (Wimmer & Perner, 1983) and episodic recollection (Naito, 2003;Perner, Kloo & Stöttinger, 2007). The age of the children who are able to both perform well on the episodic tasks and pass the correlative cognitive tasks is 4 years or over.…”

On being stuck in time

“…This idea is particularly prominent in Suddendorf's way of framing the question as to whether or not animals are capable of mental time travel (cf. Suddendorf & Busby, 2003;Suddendorf & Corballis, 1997; see also Perner, 2007).…”